Scottish labour

Jeremy Corbyn said he wanted Labour to have an open debate about the big issues and he’s certainly got that. Yesterday, 70 per cent of the Scottish Labour conference voted for a motion opposing the renewal of the Trident independent nuclear deterrent — putting the party’s policy north of the border at odds with Labour as a whole. Although there was a motion tabled at Labour’s Brighton conference to debate Trident, it never reached the floor and the policy backing nuclear weapons remained intact. Plus, Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale is in favour of Trident, while Corbyn is thought to be against. Such votes have happened in the past at Scottish Labour conferences and

When all else fails, I suppose, you can just plead for mercy. That appears to be the message emanating from the Scottish Labour party’s conference in Perth this weekend. The theme, Kezia Dugdale says, is “Take a fresh look” at Labour. OK. [Awkward silence.] Now what? The thing is, you see, that “Take a fresh look” has been the unofficial theme of every meeting of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party since, oh, at least 1997. When you are reduced to pinching lines from the Scottish Tories you are probably in a position similar to the lost traveller seeking directions to Limerick who was told “Well, I wouldn’t start from here”. Here is where Labour

In Jeremy Corbyn’s conference speech, the Labour leader claimed that it was time young people found their fizz. ‘Young people and older people are fizzing with ideas. Let’s give them the space for that fizz to explode into the joy,’ he said optimistically. So Mr S is glad to say that Corbyn looks like he may have found his own fizz. On his trip to Scotland today, the Labour leader was gifted a bottle of Irn Bru by Kezia Dugdale, the leader of Scottish Labour. The gift of the drink which is popular in Scotland came after Corbyn declined the offer of a can of the drink from a Buzzfeed journalist this morning. Judging

Jeremy Corbyn is supposed to come to Scotland this week. Thursday’s visit will be his first since he became leader of the erstwhile people’s party. Then again, he’s been due to visit before only to find some better use of his time so who knows whether he can brave life beyond the wall this week? Yesterday John McDonnell, Jezzah’s vicar, used his speech to the Labour conference to plead with Scottish voters to “come home” to the party. It was past time, he suggested, that voters understood that the SNP are no kind of socialist revolutionaries. Which will not come as any great surprise to most Scots. That’s part of the

The answer to this question, it turns out, comes from Kenny Dalglish. The answer is mebbys aye, mebbys naw. At the weekend the Scottish party’s former leader suggested Labour should have (some kind of) ‘free vote’ in the event of there being another independence referendum. Kezia Dugdale, the latest occupant of this poisoned throne, conceded Labour MSPs should, if there is another referendum, be free to campaign for independence if that’s where their heart lies. Now, in one respect this makes sense. Labour are in a hopeless position in Scotland right now. Moreover, the party cannot recover unless it wins votes from erstwhile supporters who have crossed the constitutional aisle to support the

A year ago today, Britain woke up to find the union saved – but only just. In 10 Downing St, the 45 per cent voting ‘yes’ looked like a victory, and the whole issue closed. I was in my hometown of Nairn that day, in the Highlands, where things looked rather different: after visiting pupils in my old school I wrote that, far from being closed, the debate had just begun. It wasn’t just the depressing closeness of the result, but the way the ‘no’ campaign had relied upon relentless negativity to make its case. As Joe Pike puts it in his fascinating account, the campaign ‘left a kingdom united, but

Jeremy Corbyn really has made socialism trendy – at least in Scotland. We can take that from the speech that Kezia Dugdale, Labour’s Scottish leader, will make a today focusing on the ‘s’ word – something she is unlikely to have done had Mr Corbyn been languishing in the polls. Indeed, it was only a few weeks ago that Dugdale warned that a Corbyn victory would leave Labour ‘carping on the sidelines’. Then, as he started to edge ahead in the race, she started to move, first insisting they shared some similar policies and then meeting him privately at a rally in Edinburgh. Today she will edge even closer to his agenda

With the registration period now closed, Labour members are sitting tight, waiting for their ballot papers to arrive. A period of quiet, sober reflection now begins, as members decide who they want to see face off the Tories. But not everyone is seeing it that way. The Scottish Labour Young Socialists – who say they are ‘fighting for a new, subversive politics’ – are holding an event in honour of comrade Corbyn. Forget champagne socialism; for young Corbynites, the tipple of choice is a cocktail. Marxtini anyone?  

Kezia Dugdale, the deputy leader of the Scottish Labour party, has announced that she’s running for the leadership of the Scottish party following Jim Murphy’s resignation. With Murphy not being an MSP, it has fallen to Dugdale to take on Nicola Sturgeon at First Minister’s Questions. She is generally thought to have done a good job at it, highlighting the SNP’s poor record on education. But in the current political climate in Scotland, it is highly unlikely that Labour will be able to deny the SNP a majority at next year’s Holyrood elections. So, the risk that Dugdale—who is only 33—is taking in running is relying on the Scottish Labour

Jim Murphy is quitting Scottish Labour. After only narrowly surviving a vote of no confidence from the party’s executive this morning, Murphy announced that after a ‘terrible election defeat’, he will still tender his resignation in a month’s time. As well as acknowledging Scottish Labour’s terrible performance in the general election, Murphy opened both barrels at Len McCluskey and Unite the Union, who he blames for some of the party’s troubles in Scotland: ‘I know in the past few days, I’ve been at the centre of a campaign by the London leadership of Unite the Union and they’re blaming myself for myself and the Scottish Labour party for the defeat

You get bad losers in politics and bad winners, too, but it’s surely a rare business to get a bad winner who didn’t actually win. Yet this, since they lost last September’s referendum, has been the role of the SNP. Dismay, reassessment, introspection, contrition, resignation; all of these have been wholly absent. Instead, they have been triumphalist. Lording it, with cruel and haughty disdain, over their vanquished foes. Who, we must remember, they didn’t even vanquish. Well, maybe they’ve vanquished them now. I write this pre-election, with the polls all saying that the Nats will win something between almost every Scottish seat and actually every Scottish seat. Only, of course,

Michael Gove was out and about with fifty odd Tory activists dressed as Nicola Sturgeon in Westminster today, when he made an extraordinarily bold prediction about next week’s election results. The top Tory claimed that his party would end up with more seats in Scotland than the Labour Party. He also suggested that Sturgeon was more dangerous than Russell Brand, ‘because she votes’. While Miliband’s party might well be set for an absolute hammering north of the border next Thursday, they do currently have 41 Scottish seats whereas the Tories have a single constituency. Mr S later asked the Chief Whip to back up his claim. ‘It is a reality based prediction, yes,’ Gove

If some polls are to be believed, Labour won’t exist in Scotland after next week. All suggest it will be a considerably pruned branch of the party. Whatever happens, the campaign Scottish Labour has had to fight since the referendum shows a party coming to terms with the shocking realisation that safe seats cannot stay safe if you don’t bother to talk to voters in them. One Labour MP is notorious among colleagues for boasting in the years before this election that his canvassing involved walking around in the high street of his constituency and marking down people who greeted him as Labour voters. What a shock this election, where

Jim Murphy held a street rally in Edinburgh today. Given many of the election events from the main parties have been behind closed doors, the Scottish Labour leader deserves credit for pitching up right outside the Scottish National Gallery and standing for about an hour in a space where real genuine members of the public were walking.  He was, of course, protected by a rubber ring of activists wearing T-shirts with key Scottish Labour pledges on it, such as ending exploitative zero hours contracts and lowering tuition fees. They had placards with #toriesout splashed across them. And given the rally was secret and only advertised to the media before it

Nicola Sturgeon has been described as a rock star politician. In Tuesday’s STV debate she looked like one who is suffering from second album syndrome. Having impressed a UK-wide audience in the seven-leader ITV debate last week, her reception at the Scottish version was far more muted, with some instant polls suggesting a narrow victory for Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy. A dispassionate observer might place Sturgeon third, behind Murphy and an impressively plucky Ruth Davidson. It takes something to stand before a Scottish audience, where the Tory brand isn’t just toxic but radioactive, and earn applause for making the case to reintroduce prescription charges. Ruth Davidson is unlikely to